One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about us, people, is the way we form emotional attachments to things that aren’t, y’know, things. Paint a face on a mug and good god, you’d better not break that mug. People marry walls and have sex with cars. They get all tingly over books. And they feel real feelings about fake people in video games.

So when I say I really like video game romances, it’s true -- but it’s the romance bit, not the sex scenes where the polygons awkwardly rub up against one another. How do developers make us care enough about a character to want to watch a terrible sex scene with a fade to black? To the extent that we keep caring about them after we turn off the computer? It’s interesting to frame this question around Heaven Will Be Mine, because that game talks about ways of caring and feeling and loving that are deliberately unknowable.

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